For those of you who don't remember (or who haven't been here before), I have very short, straight, pale blonde eyelashes. They also possess superpowers - they can repel mascara. Even using a primer, most mascaras will end up under my eyes or they just magically disappear. I'm not sure where the mascara goes, but it's certainly not on my eyelashes. My usual routine consists of curling my eyelashes, applying a primer, and using a drier formula, waterproof mascara. Even with all of that, most of the time, after a few hours, some of the mascara is gone. Slightly annoying to say the least. (I found the perfect false eyelashes a few years ago, and became fairly adept at applying them - only to develop an allergy to the adhesive, which leaves my eyelids extremely puffy and red. So no more false lashes for me!)

I was excited to give the Marc Jacobs Velvet Noir mascara a try. I'm always up for trying a new mascara - hoping that it will finally be THE ONE. And I really like Marc Jacobs gel eyeliner - it stays on for hours! I was hoping to have the same luck with the mascara.

When I first saw the tube, I loved it. It just looks cool. I love that it won't roll off my makeup table. When I opened it up, I saw that the brush was sort of an hourglass shape, which is a little different. I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of mascara on the brush - but sometimes that's the case with a fresh tube.

The first time I used the mascara, I tried it without any primer. That didn't work out so well. It's a wetter mascara, so it pulled all of the curl out of my lashes. Also, there were a good number of clumps that I had to try to remove. By the time I had combed through my lashes to remove the clumps, most of the mascara was also removed, my lashes were straight, and they were just virtually unnoticeable.

The second time I used the mascara, I applied a primer first. That helped a little, but because the mascara is so wet, it really weighed down my lashes and pulled out the curl. The fact that there was primer on my lashes seemed to "attract" more of the mascara, and I had even more issues with clumping. I had to do a lot of combing to get the clumps out. That said, the mascara did stay on for about 4 hours without any smudging or flaking.

The next time I tried the mascara, I curled my lashes and applied the primer as usual. But this time, I decided to wipe a bit of the mascara off the brush. Actually, I took a good bit of it off. I didn't have any problems with clumping, and my lashes stayed curled! I applied one thin coat and let it dry for about 5 minutes. Then I wiped the brush again (since it had been reinserted into the tube during the drying time) and applied a second thin coat to the ends of my lashes.This seemed to work pretty well, and the mascara stayed on for about 4 hours without any smudging. After about 4 hours, I noticed that it was starting to wear off and I had some slight smudging under my eyes.

In the photo below, you can see the before and after of my successful third attempt. This was taken right after I had applied the mascara to the eye on the left in the photo (there is no mascara on the eye on the right, nor have the lashes been curled):

I have to be honest and say that it just about killed me to wipe so much mascara off the brush to get it to work for my lashes. As you can see from the picture, it works well enough for me, but not well enough for me to pay $26 for it. It's just not a good match for my lashes. For someone like my daughter, who has beautiful long lashes and can basically wear any mascara, it would probably work wonderfully well (and she will most likely be the recipient of my remaining mascara). But for someone like me, who has short stubby lashes that need to be curled, a dry mascara works much better.

Just to give you an idea of how this mascara compares to a drier formula on my type of lashes, below is another photo of my lashes. Both sides have been curled and prepped with the same primer. The eye on the left side of the photo has the Velvet Noir Mascara, and the eye on the right side of the photo has a drier formula. You can see that the drier formula allows my lashes to look longer and retain more curl:

My thanks to Influenster for allowing me to try this mascara. I'm still searching for my one and only mascara - the one that will complete me, make my heart go pitty-pat, and make my lashes look, well, normal - for more than just a couple of hours.